> https://theappalachianonline.com/opinion-truth-objectivity-and-postmodernism/

Is that article a spillover from the late 2010’s 90s-style culture war remake? Stuff like:

>To solve these problems, among others, Karl Marx, began drifting away from Enlightenment principles in search of ideas to eliminate the inequalities brought on by Enlightenment principles. However, the disillusionment with the Enlightenment occurred post World War I and II, when the technological marvels produced by science led to the slaughter of millions.

Doesn’t strike me as particularly productive. Marx pretty much continued the sort of critical philosophy that Kant (perhaps the most important Enlightenment thinker….or at the very least one of the most important ones) pioneered, the post-Kantians systematized, and the German idealists and their successors critiqued sympathetically.

The critique of Enlightenment ideals and conceptions of reason we see after WWII (like, say, Critical Theory and the Frankfurt School, i.e., the eternal bogeyman of a subset of the political right) strike me as perfectly in line with the very spirit of the Enlightenment, which is always also self-critical. Also blaming the disillusionment exclusively on science strikes me as misleading. There was disillusionment with the culture that spawned out of the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment at large.

>Consistent with postmodern doctrine is the belief that institutions, such as science and language, are oppressive institutes of control.

Who actually claims this and what is their actual argument here? And more importantly, what is the context of this argument? This is an often repeated claim that isn’t entirely wrong, but I worry that it has taken on a life on its own, i.e. separated from actual postmodernist thought.

>If both sides are right and wrong, does that not prove postmodernism’s point that truth is up to individual interpretation? Not exactly. Aristotle solved this philosophical problem in ancient Greece when he theorized that truth and ethical behavior bisect between two extremes, called the “Golden Mean.” Since both sides offer truth and falsehood, given their rejection of the other side’s perspective, then it stands to reason that the middle approach is true, since it formulates a solution based on complete information. To answer humankind’s biggest question pertaining to truth is to find the middle between Enlightenment and postmodern philosophy. To choose one over the other is to look at the world from an incomplete lens. We should strive to reach a reasonable approach toward human progress while acknowledging our personal bias and give those with dissenting beliefs a platform.

Disagree. A better solution would be to first actually understand what led to the disillusionment with Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment ideas and what those critiques of them (especially those that still conceive of themselves as continuing the Enlightenment project or at the very least as laboring in its spirit) say. Especially since this issue doesn’t really seem to be confined to the post-war era:

>Paradoxically, the crisis of the Enlightenment arose from within, and indeed from its most cherished principle. The problem is that this principle is self-reflexive. If reason must subject all beliefs to criticism, it must also subject its own tribunal to criticism. To exempt its tribunal from scrutiny would be nothing less than ‘dogmatism’, accepting beliefs on authority, which is the very opposite of reason. The criticism of reason therefore inevitably became the meta-criticism of reason. If the Enlightenment was the age of criticism, the 1790s were the age of meta-criticism. All the doubts about the authority of reason, which are so often said to be characteristic of our ‘post-modern’ age, were already apparent in late eighteenth-century Germany.

Frederick Beiser’s Hegel, p. 23